“Well, I've been in the city for 30 years and I've never once regretted being a nasty, greedy, cold-hearted, avaricious money-grubber... er, Conservative!” - Monty Python's Flying Circus, Season 2, Episode 11, How Not To Be Seen

Friday, April 22, 2011

Gerson Vs. Rand

Michael Gerson's latest article takes on Ayn Rand and the recent movie (first part of a trilogy) of her Seminal Work "Atlas Shrugged." He is not a fan.

If Objectivism seems familiar, it is because most people know it under another name: adolescence. Many of us experienced a few unfortunate years of invincible self-involvement, testing moral boundaries and prone to stormy egotism and hero worship. Usually one grows out of it, eventually discovering that the quality of our lives is tied to the benefit of others

Gerson points out that she saw average Americans as looters and parasites and that she wasn't a fan of Christianity. He says that her philosophy, with it's laser like focus on freedom of the individual, doesn't work.

But both libertarians and Objectivists are moved by the mania of a single idea -- a freedom indistinguishable from selfishness. This unbalanced emphasis on one element of political theory -- at the expense of other public goals such as justice and equal opportunity -- is the evidence of a rigid ideology. Socialists take a similar path, embracing equality as an absolute value. Both ideologies have led good people into supporting policies with serious human costs.

Conservatives have been generally suspicious of all ideologies, preferring long practice and moral tradition to utopian schemes of left or right. And Rand is nothing if not utopian.

So a good take down. But, there are other points of view, such as those of Gerson's readers.

i am not sure why gerson does this hit piece. it may be that he is simply a pawn of the overlords who recognize that freedom for the individual is the greatest threat to their desire to be complete rulers of the masses. consequently, knowing the overlord's wishes, gerson seeks to discredit the movie before more and more people tune in to the socialism that is creeping surreptitiously into the american gestalt.

I just checked the list of pawns and Gerson's name isn't on it. Oh and there are no overlords. And I am certainly not an overlord.

Thank God for the movie. It was released just when we have the most totalitarian government ever in power in the USA. Ayn, we miss you. You would see instantly the parallels between the Obama Administration and Stalin's USSR. Your old nemesis is right here, right now, in Washington, D.C. And the clueless observers like Gerson don't even recognize it!

We live in the most totalitarian government in power? Why doesn't overlord Obama just get rid of those annoying Tea Partiers than? Send them off to Alaska (America's Siberia).

Gerson's writing is that of a disgusting blue-blood republican that may even be more dispicable than Obama. Gerson wants the rest of us to go back to the slimy days when Republicans cut deals with democrats to sell out the public in favor of the elite (to whom if you ever watched him or read him he considers himself one of). . . . Gerson you disgust me truly.

Funny that Ayn Rand, who was pretty elitist, is being held up as a champion of the little guy.